Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.
Hyperion offers both CDs, and downloads in a number of formats. The site is also available in several languages.
Please use the dropdown buttons to set your preferred options, or use the checkbox to accept the defaults.
This is definitely Chabrier in his most gentle non-bombastic vein. The melancholy of A minor is a sign of this. Like Schubert, Chabrier relishes the change of minor to major in this key. One of the most beautiful moments is in the fourth bar of the introduction: bars 3 and 4 are an exact repetition of bars 1 and 2 with the exception of the marvellous insinuation of G sharps in the piano writing which gently lift the cadence originally in E minor (bar 2) into E major (bar 4). The right-hand piano writing is like the most eloquent of oboe solos, the gentle drooping fifth immediately establishing the mood of the piece.
This aria was written between Gounod’s Faust (1859) and Bizet’s Carmen (1875). It has the romantic Schwung of the former and some of the delicate shading and colouring of the latter. Just when one fears that the music may be tending toward the commonplace there is a turn of phrase which happily confirms the identity of its creator: the younger, rather than the mature, Chabrier. The two sections of the aria (both heard twice) are the opening ‘Allegretto tranquillo’ (A minor) and, at ‘Toi qui depuis quinze ans’, a faster A major section (‘Pressez – appassionata’) where the emotional temperature of the music is heightened by a newly energised vocal line with its repetitions of ‘Toi, Toi’ off the beat. This new hand-wringing impulse is emphasised by the piano’s ardent quasi-canonic imitations of the voice. Before the faster section there is a sostenuto passage (‘Ah! douleur amère’) where the singer’s line is doubled without harmony by the piano, a device which serves to emphasise Mariette’s bereft loneliness. The composer has no scruples about recycling words from the first strophe in the second, and adding an expressive ‘hélas’ in the closing phrase.
Darius Milhaud made use of this song (with specially commissioned words by René Chalupt) when he made a new performing version of Chabrier’s operetta Une éducation manqué for the Diaghilev company in 1924.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2002